I don’t have any police officer friends at the moment.  So I have to use the vocabulary I learn from television and movies to fill in their dialogue.

In this day and age, we hear over and over again that police dramas and procedurals are rife with inaccurate science, outlandish technology, and absurd conversations and situations.

I believe it.  Over the years I’ve seen television shows about cartoonists come and go.  That is to say, I’ve seen television shows about people who occasionally say they’re cartoonists.  If the wild inaccuracies of the cartoon sitcoms (Ted Knight drawing his comic strip with a puppet on his drawing hand, holding the pencil in its mouth, for instance) are anything like the wild inaccuracies of police shows, then it’s entirely possible that none of us have the slightest idea what policemen and women do or say all day long.

I have said all that in order to say all this: I apologize if police officers don’t actually travel a ‘beat’ while on duty.